Six-seed Soda Bread

I finally had a chance to sit down this morning and sort through the pile of notes, menus, books, and magazines I brought back from my trip to Portland. There is a loaf of six-seed soda bread baking in the oven, a slab of butter on the counter waiting for it. I was thinking I’d share some highlights (and a couple photos) from the trip to Oregon, write up the soda bread recipe for you, then give the pot of left-over soup waiting on the back burner the signal that it’s time for lunch. If you find yourself planning a trip to Portland, you can have a look at some of the places I visited the last time I was there. I revisited a few of those on this trip, and made it to a handful of new places as well. There are also lots of great suggestions from you all in the comments section. One of the highlights of the trip was getting outside Portland a bit. The area surrounding the city is beautiful, and we spent an entire day driving along two-lane back roads, pulling over to see …

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Tags: berry, breakfast, cookbooks, hotel, night, recipe, recipes, roads

How to Make Battuto: The Italian Soffritto

“Almost without fail, every dish my mother and grandmother makes starts off with a battuto.” [Photograph: Sue Veed] More Stuff You Should Know How to Poach an Egg » How to Render Bacon Fat » How to Use Parsley More » How to Salt Food » As is sad-but-true of so many die-hard French enthusiasts in the culinary world, the chef who got me through the international portion of school seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about Italian cooks. His favorite argument was that so many Italians, particularly the old-school grandmotherly types, keep their ingredients a secret. “No, no. I didn’t use any salt,” he’d mock them. “No butter either,” he’d say. “Then the moment you you’re your back to the stove, they’re adding handfuls of the stuff at a time!” Having an Italian grandmother myself, I laughed. It’s partially true. But isn’t the guessing game part of the reason why a meal from our grandmothers, or a chef in a good restaurant, is so much more fun to eat? Just how they infused so much flavor into a dish gets our imaginations going and makes our palates work a little harder. That is the magic of battuto. Although you hardly hear the word anymore—it’s…

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Tags: battuto, cookbooks, food, grandmothers, imaginations, International, italian, italians, magic, photograph, poach, portion, result, school

Creme Brulee

Creme brulee It isn’t that I haven’t been cooking, I have, but it’s been a week of failures. The goats’ cheese and gruyere bread from Saveur had a cake-like texture and slightly goaty flavor. I never liked goats’ cheese anyway. Those two loaves of bread were the most expensive I’ve ever made. Then I made a yellow butter cake from Joy Of Baking and that too didn’t turn out well. It was heavy and dry and I think it’s stupid to not use whole eggs. Since the yellow butter cake left me with all the whites, I decided to make hazelnut pavlovas. Now I’ve never made a pavlova in my life because I’m not a meringue person. I find them too dry and sweet.

Tags: butter, cake, caramel, chinese, cookbooks, fireworks, kitchen, oven, ramekins, tray

Sup! Loves Cookbooks: Seasons in the Wine Country

I have added a cookbook to Sup’s! Shop at OpenSky for you today. Its focus is the California Wine Country. Which, on its face, may seem like a bit of publisher’s culinary shorthand, and an attempt to shove a bit more “casual elegance” down the throats of we gullible foodies. But if you’ll stick with me I think you’ll see why I chose this particular book to bring to you. It’s called Seasons in the Wine Country , which might cause you to raise your eyebrows and wonder just which wine country I mean. I’ll give you a hint about that and say that the marketing manager of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone , Cate Coniff, put this collection of recipes together. That’s right I said marketing manager. But before you throw in your green and white striped side-towel and go running from my virtual kitchen, let me just say this book is way more than a promotional tool. If you are at all familiar with the food scene in California then you probably have figured out that the wine country this book is celebrating is the well-traveled oeneophilic valley known as Napa. The breadth…

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Tags: california, culinary, food, green-onion, institute, lemon zest, opensky, pepper, quick and easy, result, spring, thomas, white

Cook the Book: Olive Oil Gelato

From Recipes “When choosing an olive oil for this recipe, go with the good stuff—the flavor of the gelato depends entirely on it.” [Photograph: Caroline Russock] Spending the week cooking from Molto Gusto by Mario Batali and Mark Ladner has been an absolute joy. I was able to replicate dishes from Otto and every recipe I tried tasted nearly identical to the restaurant original—not a small feat considering the most restaurant cookbooks have a tendency to dumb down their recipes for the ease of home cooks. I waited until the end of the week to test out the recipe that I was most excited (and curious) about, olive oil gelato . The gelato at Otto is made by Meredith Kurtzman , and is worth a trip on its own. The gelato flavors rotate seasonally and are without fail some of the best in the city, but the olive oil gelato is a constant and my desert island dessert. The texture is always perfectly creamy, with haunting notes of fruit and pepper from the oil. This recipe motivated me to go out and purchase an ice cream maker. I …

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Tags: book, flavor, gelato, mario-batali, molto-gusto, olive, olive oil, recipe, recipes

Multigrain Waffles

I’ve been playing around with multigrain flour blends lately. In part, inspired by Kim Boyce’s book , in part to rid my refrigerator of endless bags and jars of flours. I mixed up a batch of these waffles last weekend for a Saturday breakfast – well worth the effort it took to dust off the waffle maker. Poppyseed-flecked and made with a blend of barley, oat, and rye flours, these multigrain waffles are buttermilk-moist with a golden crust and a hint of tanginess. I know I’m going to get a lot of questions about substituting flours here. The bulk of this blend is barley flour. The barley flour here helps keep these waffles on the light side, but if you need to replace it with whole wheat pastry flour, that should be a reasonable substitution. The whole wheat pastry flour is a bit heavier, but nothing like using a full-on hard whole wheat flour. As for the “accent flours” in this blend, I like the way the rye and oat works with the barley. I felt like quinoa flour would be too grassy…

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Tags: barley, blends, cookbooks, flour, insights, like-the-way, poppyseed, recipes, refrigerator, variations, waffle, waffle-recipe

Meet & Eat: Del Posto’s Mark Ladner

Author’s Note: Over the weekend I sat down with Mark Ladner to talk about Molto Gusto , his newly released cookbook featuring recipes from Otto the West Village pizzeria that he opened with Mario Batali, where he likes to eat, what he cooks at home, and why we should all be eating and enjoying more vegetables. [Photographs: Robyn Lee] Where did you start cooking and when did you develop your passion for Italian cuisine? I started cooking very casual fast-food as a teenager summering on Cape Cod and worked at as a pizzaiolo in Harvard Square in Boston. I have an aunt that used to hand-make manicotti for special family gatherings which blew my mind. Who has been your biggest influence when it comes to cooking? I worked at the first incarnation of Todd English ’s Olives in Boston which was a 30-seat restaurant in a townhouse. We used a wood burning oven and a rotisserie which is where the inspiration for the pizza we make at Otto came from. Jean-Georges taught me about the importance of ratios over exact recipes when it comes to cooking. Can you tell us about your favorite cookbooks? I generally …

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Tags: Companion, concept, cookbooks, food, history, inspiration, italian, kids, politics, rotisserie, time, zanini

Chocolate Cherry Brownies

I’ve been going back and forth about what to call these. Brownies that have the texture of a fallen chocolate souffle cake. Dense, ooey-gooey chocolate-y on the inside, well-set around the edges – you know the cakes. I thought I’d try to work soufflé into the title, but at the same time, these brownies are completely packed with boozy, port-soaked dried cherries, and doesn’t that warrant a mention? I like recipe names to be short enough that the titles don’t wrap (when possible), so that was a consideration as well. Port Souffle Brownies? Boozy Brownies? I settled on (yawn) Chocolate Cherry Brownies and made a batch of them for my sister and brother-in-law. They spent last Saturday working on a Habitat for Humanity project, and early that morning I traded a plate of the brownies for an adorable 1-year old , who spent the day with us. Here’s what you need to know about these brownies. They could very well be the richest, most decadent brownies you’ve ever tried. They’re off the charts delicious. They’re also off-the-charts messy, and a bit of a pain to slice – …

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Tags: bourke-street, chocolate, cookbook, food, fraiche, know-the-cakes, recipes, souffle

International House of Pancakes! Buckwheat Blini with Caviar

Pancake. The word paints quite a picture. But what kind of picture may say something about where you live and eat. So when I say pancake do you think of Sunday morning? Does your mind automatically go to maple syrup? Maybe blueberries? If you just licked your lips and nodded ‘yes’ then there is a good chance you are from North America or very well acquainted with our pancake culture. Because steaming stacks of hotcakes dripping with syrup and melted butter does indeed conjure up comfortable memories of hearth and home. But traditional pancakes don’t need to be homemade to be homey. Nor do they need to be American. In fact the griddlecake we Americans so associate with special breakfasts probably has its roots in a similarly prepared Scottish pancake. Which of course got me thinking about the roots of this simple food. One thing is for sure the pancake is an ancient food. In fact man was cooking on the griddle long before he ever got around to figuring out the concept of an oven. There are recipes for pancakes, in fact…

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Tabasco & Asparagus Quinoa

I like the idea that I can walk out my front door, put one foot in front of the other, and find myself at the beach. The Pacific Ocean meets Ocean Beach roughly five miles from where I’m sitting, and I often switch up my jogging routine to make my way west through Golden Gate Park, past the man-made waterfall, along the buffalo paddock, and out onto the Great Highway. From there you can see and hear the waves, and it is only a few steps to the sand. The quirky sights are rewarding, and they help inspire me to pull on my shoes on days when I might not feel like it. I thought I’d share a few snapshots I’ve taken along this route, as well as a quinoa recipe that made for a good post-jog lunch last week. This time of year you start to see all sorts of plants and trees blooming: poppies, cherry and plum blossoms, magnolias, camelias. There are still plenty of slumbering trees, but wait a few days. In a matter of hours a tree can explode into color from seemingly lifeless, twiggy branches. That being said, the spring rain and wind can take its toll on the flowers and some days the park looks…

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Tags: asparagus-quinoa, beach, flowers, food, gluten free recipes, lunch, park, recipes, result, shoes, snapshots, spring, time, waves